The Orchardman's Daughter

I met the orchardman's daughter.

A young woman in her twenties;

Her father had been steward forty years!

So, naturally, she'd been there 

All her life. We spoke at length.

She said more than she knew, 

And knew so much more than she could say.

The Holy Spirit urged me to ask her then, 

Hinted that He'd sent her for the purpose,

So I merely mentioned the apple blossoms 

Then she took on most reverent tones, 

Severe, even. She warned: 

No one can enter the orchard then! 

If the blooms are disturbed, 

Even by a strong enough breeze, 

All fruit is lost, even hope of fruit. 

We guard the orchard night and day.

I knew she'd say this, 

And in just that way, 

So I sent a quiet kiss Heavenward. 

For I am an Orchardman's daughter, too. 

This home is His high-walled garden,  

These daughters are His trees. 

I merely steward the place.

There will be glory and beauty for Him, 

And fruit enough for the masses.

See! Already they bloom!  

Only wait, He tells me,

And for now, guard them diligently. 

Adele's 10th Birthday

It's her tenth birthday, but Adele made us the cards. Her big sisters helped with spelling.

After a quick breakfast, Dwayne and I started the day with grocery shopping. We needed the spaghetti noodles for Adele's birthday dinner, among other things. 

When we got home from grocery shopping, we honked from inside the garage, something we always do, and the girls always come running down to help unload. They like to see what we've bought. 

Norah and her dad went back out a little later. She has to practice driving in preparation for taking her driving test.  So they took the truck and got several bags of mulch. It's that time of year. 

After cleaning while also doing laundry while also listening to some of The Literary Life's Annual Conference, Adele and I went out for a walk. We took her Foundations Memory Work (on little flashcards and one trivium table.) We walked 2.5 miles down our street and around our nearby Putnam Park, drilling her memory work to the rhythm of our steps. We sat on a picnic table by the pond to do the geography and work with the maps. 

We let ourselves get properly distracted at least one hundred times by all the lovely things around us. The pictures show three views of the same tree as I got closer and closer and closer. 

Our very long driveway is lined with rocks and mosses.  Honestly, it's one of my favorite places in the entire world. The girls like to pretend there's a throne in the middle of this particular group of rocks. Do you see it? 

Adele and I picked this dead branch up off the road and the beauty of it flamed out at me like "shining from hook fool" in the words of Hopkins. Isn't it gorgeous covered in various fungi and mold? I really need to get my field guides out and start learning how to identify these beautiful, tiny things. 

I love walking with Adele, because her young eyes see tiny blooms I'd never see otherwise. 

We said these flowers look like they are still wrapped up in their winter fleeces. It is lovely to come out and bask in the spring sunshine, but it is definitely still a bit chilly. We, too, had to have our fleeces on. 

We admired a blue bird on one of the trees along our driveway for a long time. We gazed up at him, and naturally, couldn't help but sing His praises. The blue on his head matched the sky behind him, the white on his face and belly matched the puffy clouds blowing by in the sky, and the brown on his neck matched all the tree branches under and around him; He made a perfect picture. We've never had a blue bird in our yard, so we asked him outright and out loud to stay. 

With the flowers are braving the still-cold to come out into the sun, and birds flitting and singing all around us, and smells of thawing ground everywhere, it all goes right along with CS Lewis's "Love's as warm as tears" that was in today's reading for Malcolm Guite's Waiting on the Word:

Love's as fresh as spring,

    Love is spring:

Bird-song in the air, 

Cool smells in a wood, 

Whispering 'Dare! Dare!'

To sap, to blood, 

Telling, 'Ease, safety, rest,

Are good; not best.'

The daffodils in our yard are blooming. I'm always so thankful that the previous owner took the trouble to plant them along the front walkways. 

For her birthday meal, Adele wanted spaghetti; It's her favorite. And she asked to help make it. She's my "kitchen helper," and I just love working with her in the kitchen.  

Dwayne made the cookies we needed for Adele's special birthday dessert. 

The girls spent some of their free time cross-stitching, drawing, and watching a "how-to croquet" video. Avril came upstairs after attempting to croquet and said, "I admit defeat," throwing a ball of yarn and her hooks down on the kitchen table. We shared a laugh. 

Adele wanted Smores on chocolate chip cookies instead of graham crackers, so Dwayne made a fire with the last of our wood for the season, and we put down an old quilt to protect my rug on the floor from embers and melted chocolate. We toasted marshmallows right in the fire place. (We never, ever eat in the living room!) But it felt properly celebratory to throw off propriety in order to Adele's vision happen. 

Adele got the idea for this special dessert from a book she picked up at the annual library book sale. She's actually got several desserts in this book marked, and I find her studying this book intently often, which just makes me laugh to myself. So it was rewarding to finally let her make one of the desserts in it. 

 

Memory Masters Parent Proof

Adele passed her parent proof for Classical Conversations Memory Masters today! (I'm writing on Thursday. This won't post till Saturday.)

This means she sat down with me, her parent, and recited all the Foundations Memory Work for this year, every subject, without any errors. 

Even for Adele, who knew all the facts seemingly backwards and forwards, it was a demanding process to prepare for this test. Parents have to ask the questions in a certain way; Students have to answer in a certain way. The test has to be done in one sitting, so all this means that even kids who really know the material have to build up endurance and focus to just manage the formal testing process and recall all the answers quickly enough.  

Disclaimer: Honestly, I don't care two bits about formal grades or test performance at this point in my homeschooling journey, especially now that my oldest got into college/s and did well throughout all that is involved with that process. My kids work through their math texts, for example, but I only rarely make them actually use their separate math test booklets. Why make my student sit down for a test when I have checked almost every other page of their math text and I already know they are mastering the concepts. There is no need for a teacher to send a number grade home to communicate mastery or failure to a parent. I'm both the parent and the teacher, so I already know they've mastered the concepts and done the body of work necessary to move on. I am constantly assessing their work naturally as part of our homeschool day together, so when Adele expressed a desire to do Memory Masters this year... I had real inner conflict. 

We memorize the Classical Conversations Memory work, but the facts become a natural part of our family culture and conversation, since we all know them and refer to them often. Even Dad knows them. But the formality of this test is off-putting to me, since it feels so artificial and sterile to for a human parent to make her human human student sit for over an hour answering prompt after prompt in a very formal way... 

That is, unless the particular student actually enjoys that sort of challenge, and their face is all aglow when they can rise to that sort of challenge... 

Adele is that sort of person. She has a different personality than my other kids. She really enjoys pushing herself. (This is the same kid who I found her climbing our bunk beds in preschool, and when I told her, "You can't climb the bunk beds," she protested and said, "But Mom! I'm good at it." And she really was. You should see her run. It's a joy to watch her drive herself forward, and her face beams joy with the exertion. This is exactly why she's still in basketball lessons even though the regular season ended for her sisters. She, specifically, begged to keep going.) And I have been in Classical Conversations as a parent for almost ten years, and I've even been a Foundations tutor and director before, so I know some of the students actually enjoy the challenge and are invigorated under the testing. So when Adele expressed the desire to do Memory Masters not just once, but again two, three, and even four times, I felt an obligation to support her as the parent in order to try to make it happen. And I did. We sat and worked through the material in longer and longer portions until it was mastered in a way that would "pass" the test. Then I gave her the full test and she passed it! 

Now that she has passed the parent proof, we are arranging for her to take the test again with a neutral adult. If she passes the next test, she'll take it again with her Foundations tutor, and then finally, she'll take the test with the Foundations director, but in that case, the director doesn't ask all the questions, she only asks a random sampling.

We asked a beloved lady at church to administer the next test, someone Adele loves, someone who loves Adele back, someone Adele will be comfortable singing the songs to, etc. We're waiting to hear back about whether she can do it. 

In the meantime, we're breathing easier and celebrating. But we'll also keep practicing everyday to stay sharp/ get sharper.  

Even if she can't make it past the next step, she is really, really, really proud of herself for making it past the parent proof, and I am proud of her.  

She really didn't know if she could do it. She expressed a lot of frustration and doubt. But we kept promising each other it was going to be okay no matter the outcome if she simply did her best, trying once a day to pass a parent proof up to the deadline we set. (We set a firm deadline, and we stuck to it. If she didn't pass by then, she couldn't go on, etc.)

So as difficult as the test preparation was, this was actually more natural and positive for her as a unique person, so I let her go for it, then I encouraged her to keep going even right up to the deadline when it looked like she might actually get right up to the deadline and still fail to pass. I confess I almost let her quit on herself in order to protect her from severe disappointment over something as trivial and artificial as a test. But I see now that quitting might have been the failure. She has a sweet, humble pride within her heart over what she accomplished, and her sisters are making a fuss over her, because no one else has ever been willing to work so hard to do Memory Masters. Now I'm glad I let her keep going/ encouraged her to keep trying to the "end." I think she learned a valuable lesson about what she is capable of, and so did I.  She knows how hard it was/ is for her, and she now she knows she did it/ can do it after all. 

Clay Crafts

Tuppence a bag

And watch that blowfish blow! 

 

Geode

We studied crystals at Classical Conversations, and Adele was given a geode to bring home. She's been waiting patiently to break it open. Tonight, her dad helped her using tools in the garage. We're not sure what the crystal is yet, but we've got some books that'll help us identify it. In the meantime, we're busy admiring it.     

March in Books

 

I totally forgot to recap my reading in March. 

So here it is now. 

I started reading The Word in the Wilderness on March 2 with the beginning of Lent. I'm still reading a poem each morning until Easter. I love it! I will probably repeat this book next Lent. 

I finished a book of Matthew Arnold's poems in March. 

I finished listening to The City of God by Augustine sometime in March, but then I promptly started relistening to it again when I was done. I also ordered the text to highlight, so I am working through that again now. 

I also reread The Tempest by Shakespeare and The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis.

I started reading Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Anne Dillard and The Complete Poems of John Keats and I started rereading Another Sort of Learning, but I am not done with any of those. (This happens. I wander through a few books at the same time.)

I read A Heart to Know Him by Lynne Bauman. (And then I got to talk to the author about all my highlights, because she's my church's women's director, and she graciously took me out for coffee.) 

I also listened to the entire audio book of Where The Crawdads Sing, probably within twenty four hours. I couldn't sleep one night, so I got a lot of listening done then. 

I also reread portions of the books I use for directing my Challenge 4 class. Those include The Aeneid and The Discoverers and Mere Christianity. Those books are always "in the background," so I don't know how to count them, especially since the readings often stretch over the length of months. 

Camping Plans

We explored a new-to-us CT State park last weekend and made notes of the sites we liked best. We're dreaming of a few camping trips this last summer that Norah is at home with us. It might be time to reserve the sites soon.